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Carbon Dioxide and Water Found On Exoplanet
Off the Rails writes "The BBC reports that evidence has been found for both water vapour and carbon dioxide on a planet 63 light years away. The planet is a 'hot Jupiter' with a surface temperature of 1173K and an orbital period of just 53 hours. The gases were found spectroscopically once its orbit had been deduced from observation. NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life." Wikipedia also has an entry on the planet, dubbed HD 189733b.
I for one welcome our new 1173 Kelvin alien overlords!
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I'm of the opinion that spending billions of dollars on searching for ET life is silly, but in this article's [or the summary thereof] defense, it didn't say THIS planet was habitable. My reading was that they simply proved (presumably) that they were able to find out if water and CO2 exists on a planet.
The temperature of a gas giant has little meaning since it increases with depth.
Since there is little to no "surface" there are just different temperatures at different altitudes.
For example, there is perfectly comfortable weather on Venus at a certain altitude, around 50 km... just not at the surface.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Kepler will be a small telescope (about 1 meter) in orbit, with the sole mission of looking at a few fixed areas on the sky and searching for planets by the transit method: take thousands of pictures and look for stars which become dimmer for a few hours due to a planet crossing their disks. This small mission will launch in spring 2009 and is NOT a replacement for HST.
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is Hubble's replacement. It will be much larger (with a mirror around 6.5 meters in diameter) and carry out many, many different types of observations. This mission will launch, uh, some time around 2013, if all goes well.
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Wikipedia also has an entry on the planet, dubbed HD 189733b.
Notice that astronomers are not typically confused with the lives of the party.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
640k ought to be enough for anyone.
All we need now is some sodastream flavouring and we're sorted!
Suntan lotion won't stop you from getting baked; it will just leave your corpse without that nice, crispy skin. I say don't fight it and lather up with butter, salt, and pepper.
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" NASA hailed the news as proof that Kepler will be able to do its job of finding planets capable of supporting life."
Somebody's trying to avoid funding cuts from the new administration
If you think
Kepler is a space telescope designed to look for planets that transit their stars from our point of view.
It's been well established by ground telescopes that you can detect planets, including fairly small planets and ones in quite distant orbits using this method.
It's now been established that you can get reasonable spectra of transiting planets through this subtraction method.
Thus, Kepler, which detects planets that transit their stars, should be able to detect planets that are the right size and in the right orbit for life, and should ALSO be able to obtain spectra so their composition can be determined.
Thus, Kepler should be able to detect planets where life is possible, or even likely.
Your understanding is incorrect.
Kepler is designed to detect planets that transit their parent stars. That is, the planet passes directly in front of the star from our point of view. That causes the perceived brightness of the start to decrease a little when the planet passes in front.
Kepler is expected to be able to detect Earth-sized planets. Since the planet passes directly in front of the star, you can measure changes in the spectra from the system as the planet passes in front. By subtracting the star - planet and the star + planet measurements, you can get an idea of the composition of the planet's atmosphere.
That may well be true, but that doesn't take away the negative impact SUVs have on the environment. An SUV is far heavier and emits far more greenhouse gasses than a regular car.
Just because other things are even worse doesn't mean we shouldn't do anything about massive, unnecessary cars. Get a smaller car, use transit, get a bike, it does have an impact. If you constantly argue that anything you do has a smaller impact than other things, we'll never get anywhere.
Is it really not obvious what they were saying? Does it really need to be spelled out? Apparently, so here goes. They were able to identify a planet that has both water and carbon dioxide. It happens to be very hot, and thus this particular planet is unlikely to host life, however it is a proof of concept for the technique of doing spectroscopy on distant exoplanets. They are going to be fielding better telescopes in the future, which should be able to detect smaller and cooler planets that are capable of supporting life.
Hope that makes sense!
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